Massive 5,000-Year-Old Stone Monument Unveiled in Israel

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A 5,000-year-old monument has been revealed northwest of the Sea of Galilee (pictured) in Israel. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – A 5,000-year-old monument was revealed northwest of the Sea of Galilee in Israel. The structure is a lunar-crescent-shaped stone with a volume of nearly 500,000 cubic feet and a length of about 492 feet.

The stone dates to between 3050 B.C. and 2650 B.C., which makes it older than both the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge.

“The proposed interpretation for the site is that it constituted a prominent landmark in its natural landscape, serving to mark possession and to assert authority and rights over natural resources by a local rural or pastoral population,” Ido Wachtel, a doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been working on the site, wrote in the summary of a presentation by the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.

“The estimation of working days invested in the construction [of] the site is between 35,000 days in the lower estimate [and] 50,000 in the higher,” Wachtel told Live Science. This likely means that more than 200 people needed to work for more than five months in order to construct the monument.